How many calories are in ranch dressing?
About 64 calories a tablespoon, from the USDA, with 6.7 g of fat and 135 mg of sodium. A ladle or a 2 oz cup holds about four tablespoons, around 256 calories. That’s more than ten times the 24 calories in the three cups of romaine under it.
Ranch has a reputation as the worst dressing on the menu, and spoon for spoon it isn’t. A tablespoon of ranch has about half the calories of a tablespoon of olive oil (119) and less than caesar (80). Ranch’s problem is how much of it goes on. It comes in a cup for dipping, it gets ladled, and a cup on the side is easy to finish.
What we’d do
If you love ranch, keep it and count it. A tablespoon on a salad, or two at most, measured or poured from a cup on the side. Don’t use the whole cup because it came with the bowl. If you’d rather have the vinaigrette, our bowl builder’s one change for a salad with chicken and ranch is a tablespoon of olive oil with vinegar, and the calories barely move.
A ladle of ranch has nearly the calories of a palm of grilled chicken and half a cup of chickpeas together (274), with almost none of the protein or fiber.
Ranch by the amount
| Ranch | Calories | On a side salad, the dressing’s share | On a salad with chicken |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 tablespoon | 64 | 64% | 24% |
| 2 tablespoons | 128 | 78% | 39% |
| 3 tablespoons | 192 | 84% | 49% |
| 4 tablespoons, a ladle or 2 oz cup | 256 | 88% | 56% |
The side salad is 2 cups of romaine, half a tomato and half a cup of cucumber. The salad with chicken is 3 cups of romaine, a palm of grilled chicken (3 oz), a tomato and half a cup of cucumber. At four tablespoons the ranch has more calories than everything under it put together, on both.
What’s in a tablespoon
By weight, a tablespoon of ranch (15 g) is close to half fat and half water. It has 6.7 g of fat, 1 g of it saturated, 0.9 g of carbs, 0.7 g of sugar, 0.2 g of protein and 135 mg of sodium. Four tablespoons come to 540 mg of sodium.
The fat in ranch does help you absorb the carotenoids in the vegetables. In a 2004 Iowa State study, a dressing with 6 g of oil let more of them into the blood than a fat-free one, and a tablespoon of ranch has 6.7 g of fat. The cost is the calories, which climb fast when it’s poured without a spoon.
Ranch against the other dressings
| Per tablespoon | Calories |
|---|---|
| Olive oil | 119 |
| Olive oil and vinegar, 3 to 1 | 90 |
| Caesar | 80 |
| Blue cheese | 77 |
| Italian, bottled | 69 |
| Ranch | 64 |
| Thousand island | 59 |
Try it
On the pour, pick ranch and slide from a teaspoon to a quarter cup. The salad with chicken page shows the same bowl at 1, 2 and 4 tablespoons with its grade at each.
5 sources
- USDA Standard Reference, salad dressing, regular, ranchnutritionvalue.org
- USDA Standard Reference, oil, salad or cooking, olivenutritionvalue.org
- USDA Standard Reference, salad dressing, regular, caesarnutritionvalue.org
- Gebhardt and Thomas, Nutritive Value of Foods, Home and Garden Bulletin 72, USDA Agricultural Research Service, 2002ars.usda.gov
- Brown et al., Carotenoid bioavailability is higher from salads ingested with full-fat than with fat-reduced salad dressings as measured with electrochemical detection, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2004pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
